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From: rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: SCO's hacks to tar and compress
Message-ID: <309@sherpa.UUCP>
Date: 24 Aug 90 01:22:05 GMT
References: <15784@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Organization: Personal System Computing,  St. Petersburg, FL
Lines: 19

From article <15784@bfmny0.BFM.COM>, by tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff):
> In article <307@sherpa.UUCP> rac@sherpa.UUCP (Roger Cornelius) writes:
>>The extraction phase somehow senses the files are compressed 
> 
> The standard way to do this is to check for
> 
> 	0x1f 0x9d
> 
> at the start of file.  Dump some .Z's some time...

I have.  The third byte into the file will also tell you if it was
compressed with 12, 13, ..., 16 bits.  The point of the article was
not how to read the compress program's magic numbers, it was that SCO
has hacked tar and compress without bothering to document the changes.

--
Roger A. Cornelius          rac@sherpa.UUCP         uunet!sherpa!rac